1 hour ago, Noel said:

Me too Bob, but alas it didn't happen.  

I wondered the same. I would have been willing to jump back over to a 3080ti if it was 16gigs but oh well. I'm holding this gpu and cpu until the next round of GPU/CPU releases then do a reassessment at that point.

If the optimizations go really well and the new hardware isn't a major jump then ill keep what i have. However if we are still talking about sim performance and stutters in November 2021 and the new releases give a decent jump in performance i'm offloading everything and getting the new stuff.

Edited July 14, 20214 yr by Maxis

I think it's hopeful it will go well, at least in terms of performance.  After all they seem focused on making the sim perform well for Xbox and Xbox Series X and in virtually all areas that matter XB Series X is only slightly over half of what 3080Ti is,  3080 Ti has 50% more bandwidth, almost 3x TFLOPS, double the transistor count, almost 3x the shading units, etc.  We'll see and I have to believe all of these optimizations are absolutely directed at making it work for Xbox.  Hopefully that doesn't degrade IQ for PC platform, which I think is plausible.

I sincerely hope you are happy with it Noel.  I will probably follow you at some stage, but when the cards are nearer the original recommended retail price.    

Please come back and post your results after the upgrade; it will be of interest to me for sure.

Edited July 14, 20214 yr by bobcat999

16 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

I sincerely hope you are happy with it Noel.  I will probably follow you at some stage, but when the cards are nearer the original recommended retail price.    

Please come back and post your results after the upgrade; it will be of interest to me for sure.

I know it's crazy the pricing now.  Hopefully it will improve sooner than later, but I won't hold my breath on that either.  It's feeding the inflationary spiral which is well under way.   I may not be wise, but I can rationalize w/ the best of them!  I'm feeling a little flush right now is part of the context and again I feel it's important to match parts and the clock is ticking on my 9900K, though as you well know that CPU performance clock ticks very slowly!  The move to 9900K from my now 7 y/o 3930K CPU increased thruput by only about 50% or less, about the same as 2070 Super to 3080Ti.  That old box drives a digital piano now, so should last a very long time more back to 3Ghz and almost no voltage!

Yes, I will report back soonish.  What would give me some good buyer's remorse, and I am prone to that so am slow to act normally, is if at the same sliders I still see VRAM and use approach the limit.  Can't imagine how that could be but modern PCs like slithy toves do gyle and gimble in the wabe 

On 7/13/2021 at 3:00 PM, Noel said:

But, and it's a big one, does this have to do with changing sliders?  Right now I have a few on Ultra, many on High, LOD I will modulate according to flight plan, but RS is always at 100, and I'm at 1440p, vsync'd to 30Hz, and these are very significant factors.  So really my question was somewhat vaguely phrased and should have read:  does VRAM go up when sliders/settings are identical, and the less amount of 8Gb being the reference point?  Perhaps it may be a case of not really knowing where VRAM use would be, when limited to 8Gb, very hard to predict for me.

Yes it will use more memory if it has it available. I came from a 2080 w/ 8gigs of Vram and it would work with maxed out settings but would stutter in the higher dense areas. Once I gave it a 3090 24G of vram the stutters went away without touching any settings.

On 7/14/2021 at 6:15 AM, Noel said:

I have one 3440x1440 display.  Do you think 3080Ti w/ 12Gb would be sufficient to drive 30fps in most scenarios? 

You will be fine, My 2080 was able to do that. The problem will be finding a 3080ti. But once you do, it will be awesome.

2 hours ago, TurboKen said:

I came from a 2080 w/ 8gigs of Vram and it would work with maxed out settings but would stutter in the higher dense areas. Once I gave it a 3090 24G of vram the stutters went away without touching any settings.

Well, that is the question, is there enough VRAM.  I just couldn't bring myself to pay another $1000 for 12Gb of VRAM!  Fortunately the GPU is at least as strong as the 3090's is.  A 3080Ti is currently on its way and will be here in about a week.   And then there's the aledged optimizations.  I must say I'm a little unbelieving on these optimizations they sound too good to be true, unless they sacrificed something elsewhere in the image quality domain.  Very frequently I don't hit the 8Gb VRAM on my 2070 Super but it is in the high density areas where it can just barely hit the 8gb VRAM limit, during which I am unable to maintain the critical 30fps, but it's close, so it will go in and out of maintaining 30fps.  On final into KLAX all was great until the last mile or two then VRAM hit 8Gb and stutters ensued, of course.  I don't mind running some settings lower than Ultra so I will be very happy if I can run my same settings and not have the choking that happens on final approach at the busier airports.  What's a little hard to explain though I have some guesses, is that I can take off at an airport and all's well, but if I fly into that same airport, it can have troubles.   It's like there is an accumulation of processing debt incurred over longer flights.   I have to think 50% more VRAM ought to be able to handle it because that is a huge increase over baseline!   Plus 47% more GPU processing power so if i were to bet, I think you're right I should be fine.

4 hours ago, TurboKen said:

Yes it will use more memory if it has it available. I came from a 2080 w/ 8gigs of Vram and it would work with maxed out settings but would stutter in the higher dense areas. Once I gave it a 3090 24G of vram the stutters went away without touching any settings.

What I wonder is, does it start paging to system memory if it runs out of vram?  And that is the stutter in that situation?

I don't know enough about the inner workings to know that.

12 minutes ago, Mace said:

What I wonder is, does it start paging to system memory if it runs out of vram?  And that is the stutter in that situation?

I don't know enough about the inner workings to know that.

I think for me using something like RTSS to decide where to set sliders can be misleading.  It's been hard to discipline myself for the worst case parts of a given flight is a good part of the problem.  I think you need more headroom than just dialing settings such that you're around 90% on CPU or GPU or VRAM.  I think for me w/ using vsync to 30Hz I really need to try to keep those in the low 80% range to cope w/ transient spikes in demand that happen typically on final approach in busier airports.  What's a massive saving grace is I can dial LOD from 200 down to 120, and can hardly see the difference in most all areas, except RTSS' OSD will demonstrate substantial reduction in utilization and often will eliminate the frame rate drops on final approach.  I have ORBX KSBA and it can be pretty demanding.   Today I landed at dusk w/ O-LOD at 100, and T-LOD at 150 and had only the slightest stutter in one or two spots, just before landing when VRAM went to about 7850.  I have let myself believe I can run settings higher, because in many areas I can including getting all the way over Los Angeles w/ LOD's near 200 perfectly smooth, but then bad frame drops for the last couple miles into KLAX and during taxi as well. 

Edited July 16, 20214 yr by Noel

15 hours ago, Noel said:

Well, that is the question, is there enough VRAM.  I just couldn't bring myself to pay another $1000 for 12Gb of VRAM!  Fortunately the GPU is at least as strong as the 3090's is.  A 3080Ti is currently on its way and will be here in about a week.   And then there's the aledged optimizations.  I must say I'm a little unbelieving on these optimizations they sound too good to be true, unless they sacrificed something elsewhere in the image quality domain.  Very frequently I don't hit the 8Gb VRAM on my 2070 Super but it is in the high density areas where it can just barely hit the 8gb VRAM limit, during which I am unable to maintain the critical 30fps, but it's close, so it will go in and out of maintaining 30fps.  On final into KLAX all was great until the last mile or two then VRAM hit 8Gb and stutters ensued, of course. 

You will be VERY happy with your purchase. I highly doubt you will have the same stutters with the additional vram. 

In-addition if you play any other games you will be able to MAX out everything with the new card. ENJOY!

14 hours ago, Mace said:

What I wonder is, does it start paging to system memory if it runs out of vram?  And that is the stutter in that situation?

I don't know enough about the inner workings to know that.

That's exactly what its doing. So dropping the LOD and shadow quality down a little can help with that. Lower resolution scale down to 80 if you still have problems.

50 minutes ago, TurboKen said:

You will be VERY happy with your purchase. I highly doubt you will have the same stutters with the additional vram. 

In-addition if you play any other games you will be able to MAX out everything with the new card. ENJOY!

Thank you for the reassurance I need that after what I spent on that card!   I will be very surprised if I don't have a lot of VRAM headroom left w/ how I have the sim setup.  It's quite rare for me to be more than about 7.5Gb of VRAM in use, and my entire goal here is to not have to stop the sim once off the ground to increase sliders.  In the air, it's clouds that sometimes do me in, and always that's a case of GPU utilization, not VRAM per se.  On the ground it's both, but more often VRAM comes into play.  I think from screenshots of lower VRAM use w/ the perf update I have to wonder if this is mostly from doing better at unloading VRAM that's not critical for that moment in time.  I think I saw about a 20% reduction in VRAM, so for my 12Gb card that would translate to roughly 14.4Gb in today's MSFS.  All in how I'm setup and as I say I just don't see the benefits visually w/ running everything at Ultra.  Here's what a mean:  at Nice, FR.  I can see individual trees in the distant horizon (where they exist), everything is sharp and clear, and you can I'm at about 7.6Gb of VRAM and 80% utilization or so.  Ample CPU headroom too:

Yes, I do play one other game which is my fav game of all time hands down:  Ghost Recon:  Wildlands   That is everything I could ever want to have in a FPS and has amazing staying power for me I've used it for several years when in the mood.  Since I'm not competing online there is no downside to setting up the same way, shockingly to many, which is vsync'd to 30Hz.  Even my 2070 Super runs it w/o a problem, so we can try vsync to 60hz and see if it's an improvement w/ the new card.

 

Edited July 16, 20214 yr by Noel

4 hours ago, Noel said:

Thank you for the reassurance I need that after what I spent on that card!   I will be very surprised if I don't have a lot of VRAM headroom left w/ how I have the sim setup.  It's quite rare for me to be more than about 7.5Gb of VRAM in use, and my entire goal here is to not have to stop the sim once off the ground to increase sliders.  In the air, it's clouds that sometimes do me in, and always that's a case of GPU utilization, not VRAM per se.  On the ground it's both, but more often VRAM comes into play.  I think from screenshots of lower VRAM use w/ the perf update I have to wonder if this is mostly from doing better at unloading VRAM that's not critical for that moment in time.  I think I saw about a 20% reduction in VRAM, so for my 12Gb card that would translate to roughly 14.4Gb in today's MSFS.  All in how I'm setup and as I say I just don't see the benefits visually w/ running everything at Ultra.  Here's what a mean:  at Nice, FR.  I can see individual trees in the distant horizon (where they exist), everything is sharp and clear, and you can I'm at about 7.6Gb of VRAM and 80% utilization or so.  Ample CPU headroom too:

 

Here is a post I made when I got my new card 7 months ago.. there is some direct comparisons between the two cards which should be very similar to your results. I also want to add there have probably been a few performance updates to MSFS since these results were taken. Not to mention the big one coming at the end of the month.

Posted January 12 (edited)

Hello fellow flight sim enthusiasts. I am one of the lucky few who came across an RTX3090 card and was able to purchase before a bot got it. I decided to run some comparison tests with my current card before selling. Currently I use a Gigabyte RTX2080 OC edition which is a great card and runs most games/sims very well. The new card is a EVGA RTX3090 FTW3.
I will be giving results for several games in-addition to the flight sims I play so that people can make an informed decision on weather it will meet your expectations so stay-tuned. The first question you all want to know is... Was it worth it? Well to be honest that depends on what sim you fly.
You can see computer specs in my sig below, all tests were ran with the RTX2080 first with a restart in-between tests. Then I swapped in the RTX3090. I used 457.30 nvidia drivers and had Vsync enabled. Tests were @ 3840 x 1600 on a 38" Dell ultrawide monitor if anyone is curious.
OK, OK. Here are the results...
Prepar3d V4
SEATAC w/ mostly high settings and ORBX PNW and DD Seattle
RTX2080  34FPS
RTX3090  36FPS
DT Seattle
RTX2080  40FPS
RTX3090  45FPS
As you can see the mostly cpu dependant sim does not benefit from the increased GPU horsepower here but you will want to keep reading if you fly other sims.
Prepar3d V5
SEATAC w/ mostly high settings and ORBX True Earth
RTX2080  31FPS
RTX3090  50FPS
DT Seattle 
RTX2080  35FPS
RTX3090  55FPS
Here it really shows the work LM have done with off loading much of the work to the GPU. V5 w/True earth is really stunning and the smoothness is something to be seen.
MSFS2020
SEATAC all settings on ULTRA w/DD seattle 
RTX2080  25FPS
RTX3090  40FPS
DT Seattle
RTX2080  16FPS
RTX3090  35FPS
NYC Empire State Building
RTX2080  33FPS  (on MED settings 45FPS)
RTX3090  47FPS
So yeah.. the RTX3090 results speak for themselves. Flying in bad weather, sunset, shadows, traffic, bla bla bla it doesnt care. It's smooth.
Another interesting note the 3090 will use up to 13 Gigs of video ram sitting at KPDX with the FlightBeam add-on and traffic. So the extra ram the 3090 gives you will get put to use.
Now if you are interested in different games keep reading...
All games below were on Max graphics settings and RTX enabled if available. My monitor has Vsync enabled and maxes out at 60. And all were very smooth.
                                             RTX2080            RTX3090
Heaven Benchmark              55                      108
Valley Benchmark                 52                      107
3DMark Port Royal                31                      64
Battlefield V                           45                      60
Project Cars 2                       48                       60
Asseto Corsa Compitition      53                      60
Dirt 2                                      50                      60        

OK That's it. I hope this helps you make a decision however it will probably not make it any better on the poor stock levels. Good luck out there and stay safe.    

Edited July 16, 20214 yr by TurboKen

It looks promising.  I think I'll be fine because once again, I have several sliders turned down from Ultra, in fact most, and don't mind reducing LOD down which for reasons I can't explain don't appear a whole lot different, which is a very good thing!  This, combined w/ my smaller pixel count at 3440x1440--this is only 75% if what you were using for these comparisons--should leave me in good shape even before the performance optimizations coming soon.  Thank you especially for commenting on VRAM at KPDX w/ FB addon.  This alone tells me I should be way good to go!  Thanks Ken!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, I have the graphics controls for AF/AA at 16x and 8x8, and render scaling always at 100.  Right now I'm having great success by just dialing back a few more settings (Trees/Bushes at Medium) and thing still look awesome.  Here we are in Liverpool and it's just amazing how good it is even w/ reduced settings.  Of course this is a .png file and on the screen it's razor sharp.  Note VRAM at 7712, but CPU-16 at only 38%.

I tried several times to grab a 3090 from BestBuy's regular drops, and actually was able to hit the Add to Cart button once, but alas it never materialized.   The 3080Ti should hold me over until a new build happens in about 4y, and then it will be RTX 5000 series or what have you.

 

 

Edited July 16, 20214 yr by Noel